Queen Nzinga Of Ndongo (Angola)

 Queen Nzinga of Ndongo (Angola)

Why she kicks ass:

Nzingha a Mbande (also known as Ana de Sousa Nzingha Mbande) was a 17th century queen (muchino a muhatu) of the Ndongo and Matamba Kingdoms of the Mbundu people in southwestern Africa.

She has been called the “greatest military strategist that ever confronted the armed forces of Portugal.” Her military campaigns kept the Portuguese in Africa at bay for more than four decades. 

Her objective was nothing less than the complete and total destruction of the African slave trade. 

She sent ambassadors throughout West and Central Africa with the intent of enlisting a huge coalition of African armies to eject the Portuguese. 

Queen Nzingha died fighting for her people in 1663 at the ripe old age of eighty-one. Africa has known no greater patriot.

Nzinga left an impression after making a fool of Portuguese Governor, Correa de Souza. 

It was to Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Beaufort, rather than Henry VII, that the early Tudor court owed its reputation for splendour. Margaret penned a book that laid out the minutiae of royal etiquette and it was adhered to well into the next reign; Elizabeth, who as Edward IV’s daughter had grown up at a court praised for its luxury and pomp, helped add a sophisticated lustre to the royal household that it might otherwise have been lacking. And Henry needed these women to help him. What is often overlooked about Henry VII is that he spent the first fourteen years of his life in Wales and the next fourteen in Europe, so in 1485 he found himself king of ‘a country he neither knew nor understood.’ New palaces arose, with the many-towered riverside wonder at Richmond proving a particular high point of the Renaissance style in northern Europe; the court glittered, its behaviour monitored by the king’s mother and its style augmented by his wife. The queen’s cousin, the Duke of Buckingham, appeared at state events wearing a sumptuously bejewelled outfit, said to have cost £ 1,500, at a time when the average weekly wage for a skilled worker was about forty pence and in the period pre-decimalisation of the currency there were 240 pence in every pound. All of the glamour was designed to project an image of a monarchy sedate in its magnificent. Margaret Beaufort and Queen Elizabeth helped create a system which recast a man who had lived life in a kind of shadow as the leading figure in an elaborate political show. The decision to retain many of the advisers who served Henry VI or Edward IV was another reflection of the king’s conservatism as well as the necessity of having people at his side who actually understood England and the English.

— An Illustrated Introduction to the Tudors, Gareth Russell

the daughters of jacquetta of luxembourg and richard woodville, baron rivers

History Meme: List of Favorite Women throughout History–Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of France & England (c. 1122 – April 1, 1204)

Although Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of France and later England, lived at a time when women as individuals had few significant rights, she was nevertheless the key political figure of the 12th century. At the age of fifteen she inherited one-quarter of modern-day France, but since women were thought unfit to rule, her land as well as her person were delegated to the custody of men. Her whole life thereafter became a struggle for the independence & political power that circumstances had denied her, although few of her contemporaries could realized this.

Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography by Marion Meade

“La Mothe Fénélon referred to Elizabeth’s “grandeur” in the very first report he sent to Charles IX in November 1568. The following year, he declared that “she [Elizabeth I] has shown that she is a true Queen, daughter of a King, sister of a King, and from all royal birth” and that God had always “differentiated the good and legitimate princes, legitimately blessed by God’s approbation, from the evil and iniquitous tyrants.””

—

Estelle Paranque, Elizabeth I of England through Valois Eyes: Power, Representation, and Diplomacy in the Reign of the Queen, 1558–1588

The French ambassador Bertrand de Salignac de la Mothe Fénélon replying to the pretensions of the crazy stans of Mary Queen of Scots. You may freely quote him the next time you see some moron claiming that Mary Queen of Scots was the true queen of England.

chapter five: anne boleyn in nineteenth-century historical fiction

[citation: rosemary sweet, antiquaries: the discovery of the past in eighteenth-century britain (london: hambledon and london, 2004), 2]

[citation: elizabeth fay, romantic medievalism: history and the romantic literary ideal (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2002), 2]

[citation: stephen bann, romanticism and the rise of history (new york: trayne publishers, 1995), 4; 5]

[citation: thea tomaini, the corpse as text: disinterment and antiquarian enquiry, 1700-1900 (woodbridge: the boydell press, 2017), 12]

[additional citation: peter mandler, “revisiting the olden time: popular tudorism in the time of victoria,” in tudorism: historical imagination and the appropriation of the sixteenth century, ed. tatiana c. string and marcus bull (oxford: oxford university press, 2011)]